Seriously. At 5 and a half pounds it’s not exactly a lightweight tablet you would want to hold for hours. I have a very simple test for you: if you have an average 14”-15” laptop around, flip it open, hold it vertically, just like this:

… and tell me how long you could comfortably hold it like that. My guess is it will be just a few minutes.

Rather than build a generic consumer device and ram it down the throat of educators, we looked closely and figured out what it is a student needs.

OK, that’s a good principle. I’m a big advocate of situational devices, as long as they are affordable. What I just “don’t get” is Kno’s conclusion: students need a device that faithfully reproduces a full-size textbook.

Really? I don’t buy it. The two-sided book format as we know it was the ideal format when bound paper was the only way we could record and consume textual information. Not too convenient to hold, but nice leather-bound books look good on your bookshelf. But I somehow doubt student will pad their dorm rooms with leather-bound antiques. What they need is information. When we liberate information from paper, what is the point in replicating the paper (book) experience? Why not just accept that this is a paradigm-change and come up with the format that maximize readability and comfort while consuming information.

3 responses to “The Kno is Not a Tablet. It’s a Workout Device”

Maybe they plan to use the same strategy as current textbooks: Make minor, inconsequential changes every year that render the textbook incompatible with the new teaching guide (given to profs for free) and force the students to buy a new one every year!!!